• ls - list directory contents
• cp - copy files and directories
• mv - move (rename) files
• rm - remove files or directories
• find - search for files in a directory hierarchy
• cat - concatenate files and print on the standard output
• more - file perusal filter for crt viewing
• less - opposite of more (quit with 'q')
• cd - Change the current directory to DIR. (use "help cd" instead of "man cd")
• mkdir - make directories
• rmdir - remove empty directories

• grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern
• tail - output the last part of files
• head - output the first part of files
• sort - sort lines of text files
• uniq - report or omit repeated lines
• sed - stream editor
• wc - print the number of newlines, words, and bytes in files

• You set the system default locale to Amharic, and the gdm login will be in Amharic input mode. We didn't find out how to switch it back to input roman characters. Right click on the input field to set the input method doesn't work. Since usernames are not in Amharic, you're locked out.

• So you CTRL+ALT+F1, login and try dpkg-reconfigure locales. On Ubuntu Dapper, it does not work anymore.

• So you dig and dig and dig and finally find that you can force a locale in /etc/default/gdm (but not in /etc/gdm/locale.conf, nor in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf).

• Then the internet works for a bit and you look up how to reconfigure locales in Ubuntu. Turns out you have to use localeconf, which is not installed by default, is not in universe and thus not on the CDs, and needs to be downloaded from the Internet.

• The Ubuntu wiki is all on https, which defeats any attempt of proxy caching.

• An Internet proxy needs to be configured 3 times: in Gnome, in Firefox and in Synaptic (well, apt). This is especially tricky when you forgot to setup the proxy in Synaptic and seemingly unrelated applications fail, like the Ubuntu language selector, which internally invokes the package manager to download missing langpacks.

• Some short descriptions in the NAME section of manpages are hard to understand, or wrong. Noted on apt-get, apt-cache and less. Top prize goes to apt-cache:

  NAME
         apt-cache - APT package handling utility -- cache manipulator
  DESCRIPTION
         [...] apt-cache does not manipulate the state of the system but
         does provide operations to search and generate interesting output
         from the package metadata. [...]
  

  So apt-cache is a manipulator that doesn't manipulate. A possible improvement can be "query the APT package cache".

• The language selector in Ubuntu Breezy doesn't really exit and keeps the package database locked. This seems to be fixed in Dapper, and probably had been fixed in some Breezy update. System updates here are a problem: my Dapper (with some Universe things in it) wanted to download more than 120Mb of data, and the Uni network was giving me 14Kbps. It's been a nice opportunity to teach about fuser -uva and kill.

• dict, squid and many other packages from 'main' are not on the normal Ubuntu CDs: is there an easy way to build a CD with them? Or do Ubuntu CDs with extra packages already exist? I'll have to find out.

• cupsys has documentation outside of /usr/share/doc, in /usr/share/cups/doc-root.

• man works on all commands, except cd, which is an internal shell command and thus needs help instead of man. I should remember to ponder about autogenerating manpages from help output.

• Is there an index-like manpage with a list of the core Unix commands and their short descriptions? It there's not, it's easy to generate:

  #!/bin/sh
  DIR=$ 1:-"/bin" 
  (
  find $DIR   while read FILE
  do
     if [ -x $FILE ] && ! [ -d $FILE ]
     then
             LANG=C COLUMNS=2000 man  basename $FILE    \
                   grep ^SYNOPSIS -B 100   grep ^NAME -A 100   \
                   tail -n +2   head -n +2   \
                   grep -v '^[ \t]*$'
     fi
  done
  )   sort   uniq   sed 's/^ \+//'
  

  Try running it on /bin and /sbin: it's great!. Also, since it doesn't redirect stderr, it nicely exposes a number of manpage problems.

• Find more info about that Wikipedia live CD with Wikipedia browsable without the Internet.
• Make a collection of Free technical E-books: even those Indian low-cost book editions are too expensive here, so E-books mean a lot.